Lebanon
The Bekaa Valley, Phoenician roots, and a wine industry that kept working through a civil war.
The Phoenicians who sailed from this coast carried vines and wine across the Mediterranean, and the temple of Bacchus at Baalbek stands in the middle of the country's main vineyard. Modern Lebanese wine begins in 1857, when Jesuit monks at Ksara planted French varieties in the Bekaa Valley.
The Bekaa is a high plateau between two mountain ranges, at about 1,000 metres, with hot dry summers, cold winters and reliable sunshine. Cinsault, carignan and grenache came first, cabernet sauvignon and syrah later. The wines are warm and Mediterranean in style, and the mountain altitude keeps them from becoming heavy.
Château Musar became internationally known partly for making wine through the civil war of 1975 to 1990, moving fruit across the front line to the cellar near Beirut in most of those years. Native white varieties obeidi and merwah survive and are used in Musar's white and increasingly elsewhere.
What the label says
- NoneNo appellation system
- Lebanon has no legal appellation hierarchy. The region name on the label is a statement by the producer.
Signature grapes
our choiceKey regions
- Bekaa Valley
- West Bekaa
- Batroun
- Jezzine
- Mount Lebanon
A dashed outline is a region we describe but do not yet hold a page for.
Grapes that originate here
1Worth knowing
- Most Lebanese vineyards sit at around 1,000 metres in the Bekaa Valley.
- There is no appellation law.
- Obeidi and merwah are the surviving native white grapes.
More in Asia
Sources
The description, the reading of the classification system and the choice of signature grapes are ours. Region and grape records are built from Wikidata (CC0) and Wikipedia infoboxes (CC BY-SA 4.0). American AVA boundaries come from the TTB (public domain).